


Always 1895

by DarkCaustic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Characters Reading Fanfiction, Fanfiction, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 10:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7358506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkCaustic/pseuds/DarkCaustic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After that, he finds, well. </p><p>The good stuff, as he likes to call it. </p><p>Stories about before. Before the avengers, before the war, even. </p><p>Before, before.</p><p>Other lives. All that potential, never reached.</p><p>Stories about him, about them about–</p><p>Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story got like over a thousand notes on tumblr so I figured why not post it to Ao3.

The future has romance movies.

The future has romance movies and some of them are funny (” _Rom Coms”_   _Sam explains with an expression somewhere between exasperated and annoyed._ ) but some of them are not.

The future has romance movies and every. single. one of them has some man and woman kissing, some great misunderstanding, some hurtful longing, some sun soaked scene, a reuniting or the big forgiveness...

 

The big forgiveness for death. 

 

The healing, the grieving, the moving on.

 

Natasha sorts them yes and no,  _Yes_  to  _Pretty Woman_  and  _No_ to  _Bridges of Madison County_.  _Yes_ to  _You’ve Got Mail_ and  _No_ to  _The Vow_.

Steve watches them all anyway. Watches any one he can find the same way the infirm will listen to stories of people who got better and people who got worse. 

Every one of them leaves a sickening bruise in the middle of him. 

A dance he never got to, a hand he couldn’t reach.

Ibid. 

And yet, none of them look like him.

The pining, the absolute, heart in your throat, can’t breath  _pining_ all while knowing it was  _wrong_ and  _dirty_  and saying a word would ruin you. Ruin everything for you.

Worse than Romeo and Juliet, he thought once, a million years ago, as a lonely man in shirtsleeves leaning over the railing of the fire escape in their coldwater walk up watching the sun set between the buildings, watching the dusk guide Bucky home from the docks. 

Pretending he didn’t want to see length of Bucky’s legs, his one hand in his pocket, the swing of his shoulders and hips, the dirt on his face after a long day. Pretending it didn’t hurt in the exact way love is not supposed to. Pretending he wasn’t watching his world collapse he loved that silly boy so much.

Yeah, a little part of him is bitter for drawing that particular hand. For a dance with Peggy that never came and never having the opportunity with Buck and all these couples on the silver screen acting like their love hurts worst of all. 

 

He doesn’t watch the ones that take place in WWII.

A heart can only hold so much.

 

“Don’t watch the queer ones, they’re worse than the straight ones,” Clint says after flipping through Steve’s netflix cue. Natasha hits him on the arm. “What? Oh, sorry, I mean the  _LGBT_ ones.” He rolls his eyes and Natasha hits him again. 

Steve watches  _Were the World Mine_  and tries not to cry.

(He does but then never admits that Captain America lost that particular battle.)

 

But it’s Tony -  _Tony_  - of all people who brings it to the light. Smugly after an easy, but stupid battle, as the shit hits the news and action shots taken on cellphones go live on the web and cable news, Tony sits back and says, “You know they write stories about us?”

It’s like everyone else knows a train wreck is about to happen but no one is willing to stop it, too much fun to watch. Or maybe it’s just something about the future they’ve decided to stop hiding from Steve and Tony is the best at being blunt.

“All  _kinds_ ,” Tony continues with a salacious smirk. Then winks. The bastard. “They even have names for relationship pairs they think would be cute, or hot together. They call us  _Stony_ ,” he says and Steve is first unsettled by this knowledge but then…

Curious. Really fucking curious. 

Yeah, after he gets over initially being squicked out over  _strangers_ writing  _porn_  of  _him_.

Of him and Tony??

_And Thor???_

~~and sometimes even the Hulk??!?!?!~~

After that, he finds, well. 

The good stuff, as he likes to call it. 

Stories about  _before_. Before the avengers, before the war, even. 

Before, before.

Other lives. All that potential, never reached.

Stories about him, about  _them_  about–

Bucky.

 

They don’t get him right, of course. They didn’t actually know him and the few documentaries floating around out there about him are absurd. 

But some, some of the authors are kind to him, gentle with him. 

The way Steve wishes people had been with Bucky in life. 

And that… That’s hard to look away from. Even though it hurts, so much, like doubling over in front of his computer when someone gets to close to the nerve, to close to the bone, to close to  _real_. 

That silly boy’s smile and Steve’s fawn heart stuttering in his chest, a literal lifetime ago.

 

They write about the longing. Watching Bucky’s long fingers play in the perspiration on a Coke bottle on a hot summer day, down by the coast, or a Christmas where they Magi gift each other, or curling up under a blanket on the fire escape to watch the stars and all of them…

All of them close enough to the truth that Steve can pretend, pretend just for a moment, that they are real.

That he can picture, sweetly and perfectly, exactly how Bucky would smile over some barely adequate dinner in their flat before the big confession, the thundering of Steve’s heart and the rush of blood in his ears.

Or picturing Bucky in dress uniform, hat  _just so_  and their dates having stood them up (because there was no such dates to begin with, but Steve didn’t know) and him confessing, after, on his knees at Steve’s bedside with his hands fisted in creases of Steve’s trousers, saying  _I didn’t want to leave with you knowing, without telling—_

It hurts so bad, it hurts  _so good_. He can’t stop reading them, can’t look away.

This is one train wreck he wants to watch, wants it to wreck him, wants to remember what this feeling was like, that they never touched it but it was  _real– oh god, it was so real–_

 

Hundreds of strangers keep bringing him back to life. His blue coat, his uniform from the docks, his sunday best. Steve knew them all, has drawn them all, knows the smell and the way Bucky really did once fist his hands in Steve’s uniform and look at him like they’d both just been raised from the dead.

He thought he  _might._

Just that one moment. That one time. After they’d been rescued, before they called themselves the Howling Commandos. 

Back when they were just  _Steve_ and  _Buck_  and he still looked wild and haunted ( _died wild and haunted)_  and Steve was on his knees before him, checking him again for a wound he couldn’t find (a wound that ran too deep) and Bucky’s hands on his face, his shoulders, fisted in his jacket and his eyes flicking to Steve’s lips, to Steve’s hands, to Steve’s eyes.

 

They didn’t kiss.

It wouldn’t have been right, then. After he’d been damn near tortured to death (to this day, Steve can’t handle that he never found a wound–).

But. 

He read that fic.

That’s how he’d like to think it went down.

It should’ve gone down (that is, if Bucky had wanted, and he looked like he’d wanted, but Steve was a coward, put him to bed and stayed up another hour to watch him sleep, fitfully–)

 

The movies are good, yeah, sweet or painful or silly. 

Something mindless to keep him from wandering off to far.

But the stories are better. And the stories hurt.

Closer to the truth.

Lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows. 

There was way more at stake than anything those couples would ever know.

(Steve never tells Tony that he looked, but one day he gives Steve this  _look,_ a serious one, that’s what tips him off, before he gently squeezes Steve’s shoulder and goes back to work. Maybe Steve needs to have a talk with Jarvis about privacy among other matters.)

Besides, it’s nice,  _Always 1895_ nice to think that there, in that strange place where everything is infinite, Bucky lives. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Lonely men in shirt sleeves" is a reference to T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
> 
> "Always 1895" is a reference to Vincent Starrett's poem "221b."


	2. Chapter 2

“So wait,” Bucky says, stalling where Steve is kissing across his stomach. “You read,” he threads his metal hand through Steve’s hair. “You read  _fan fiction_ of us? Getting it on?” he asks.

“Not… not  _exclusively_ ,” Steve defends, wishing Bucky would just lay back down and let Steve continue. 

But Bucky apparently has no such plans, shifts restlessly, up onto his elbows to look down at the blonde. “Wait, you mean ‘not exclusively’ as in you read stories about other things in the interim, or, ‘not exclusively’ as in the stories you read about us were not merely about us getting it on?” Bucky asks.

Steve does have the decency to turn pink, hiding his face in the crook of Bucky’s hip. “Both?” he squeaks out.

Captain America should not squeak. He wants this line of questioning to stop.

“Huh,” Bucky says.

The silence goes on for a while and Steve knows he’s thinking, he’s about to ask another question—, “Wasn’t it weird, reading about yourself like that? Made up stories?”

Steve’s hand goes tight on Bucky’s hip and he doesn’t look up. “At, at first, yeah. I mean,” then he does look up. “Not as weird as the Tony stuff.”

“Wait a minute,” Bucky stalls again. “There are stories of  _you and Tony?”_ he asks incredulously and Steve knows he’s made a mistake telling him about this.

“Thats… neither here nor there,” Steve says, trying for his  _I’m Captain America_ voice but failing. Bucky grins wider. Steve knows he’s going to be getting terrible quotes of  _Stony_ fanfics in his text messages at the most inopportune moments for the next few months.

“To answer your original question,” Steve presses on in the hope it will derail Bucky’s plotting. “It was weird, and,” he absentmindedly traces patterns on Bucky’s skin. “And it hurt,  _a lot,_  more often than not, but it was… nice, also. To, to think of us like that. I wanted you back then and we never got a chance and I didn’t… God, Bucky, I didn’t  _know._  That you did, that you were still alive. It was the closest I thought I’d ever get to this.”

He knows he sounds like he’s gonna cry, he  _feels_  like he’s gonna cry. Every day these past few months he’s woken up with this man inside his bed, sometimes even in his arms or even  _in him_  (what a birthday), but it still feels shiny new and dreamlike. Like he’s waiting for the ice to melt. He’s waiting for his alarm clock to sound and be right back there, right back there in an empty bed too soft for it’s own good and Bucky still dead and lost and gone in a dark world that constantly needs saving.

It’s too much to think about, Steve blinks against the moisture, his face now pink for an entirely different reason.

Bucky pulls him up so he’s flush over his body. “Hey,” he says, cupping Steve’s cheek with a metal palm. “You’re all right,” he says, smoothing his opposite hand down Steve’s back. “I’m here. I’m here, baby doll, I’m here. I’m real, now, okay?” 

He sounds just like Steve did, the first few months Bucky was back and would wake gasping into the dark several times a night, disoriented and unable to ground himself. Steve got good at talking him down, soothing him. 

This, right here, is why it was never anyone else. Even when they’re like this– even when they’re both lost and broken, they know what the other one needs, what to give each other in the moment to pull them back from the brink.

“I still can’t believe it,” Steve says, his breath fanning over Bucky’s cheek. 

“Believe it,” Buck says and leans in for the kiss.

They quiet down for a while, Steve settling his body along Bucky’s. Their legs tangling, his head resting on Bucky’s flesh and blood shoulder. They breathe in sync, drifting and dozing till Bucky suddenly giggles and Steve knows he probably deserves whatever comes next.

“Hey Captain,” Bucky says with a smirk and a quirked eyebrow. “You ever write any?”


End file.
